Pet food has become more expensive, along with other food. Here is a suggestion for cutting costs and at the same time giving your pet an even better quality food. Feed your dog or cat the parts of the pasture raised chicken that you get from us that you can’t eat – the carcass. The savings on pet food will reduce the real cost of your chicken. Dogs will readily eat raw chicken bones and they need the calcium and minerals in the bones. When a fox kills and eats one of our chickens, all that is left is a pile of feathers. Raw chicken bones are not brittle, and a dog can eat them and readily digest them. There is a growing trend of feeding pets a BARF diet (Bones and Raw Food). You can do a Google search to find out more information.

Many pets are getting the same degenerative diseases as human beings. They are eating the wrong foods and poor quality foods, just like most people are. Your pet has a shorter lifespan than what you do which means that degenerative diseases show up sooner than they do in people. If your pet eats a similar diet to your own, and they get a degenerative disease, it may be a warning sign to you that your diet is not what it should be. While the diet needs of humans and animals are not totally the same, we can learn a lot about human health and nutrition by observing our animals and learning from them what makes them healthy.

How to prepare the chicken carcass for your pet food. When you take the fresh chicken home, it is relatively simple (after you do it a once or twice) to cut off the leg and thigh on each side of the chicken. Using a large sharp knife, cut the skin separating the thigh and the carcass. Then bend the leg to give access to the hip joint and cut through the joint in the hip. Cut off the wings in a similar manner. Then slice off the breast meat starting along the breast bone, and carve the meat off following the rib cage. If you didn’t cut it up quite right, that’s alright. There is no real loss. It just means you get a little less meat and your pet gets a little more. You can cut the carcass into smaller pieces using a knife to cut and break the backbone at a joint, or you could use a clean hacksaw to cut through the bones. The carcass pieces that you don’t feed the first week you can put in small packages and put in the freezer.

Another suggestion for cutting pet food costs is to feed a raw egg to your dog or cat. A dozen large eggs weighs one and a half pounds. Eggs are a cheaper source of protein for both you and your pet when compared to meat. We feed some of the cracked eggs to our cats. They love eggs and it puts a shine to their fur. However, if we feed them too many eggs they get tired of them. They need more variety than just eggs. Spice up their life and give them some variety of good healthy foods.